March 24, 2005
Money ain't a thang
Following years and years of complaining that the city is screwed by the feds on everything from paying for the inaguration to hazmat shipments to medical marijuana, Mayor Williams gives us his lovefest budget, full of money for libraries, day care, job training and other undeniably good things.
But Tony, we're getting screwed left and right! The only reason you have this money is because all the cool kids want their own place in the city and are willing to pay through the nose for it. Property taxes are what's hot right now, and there's no guarantee that they'll always be booming. The problem with singles and childless couples is that they're not permanent and not in endless supply. DC's zero-sum game is about dividing the property tax bounty into programs that will attract new taxpayers (Metrorail, roads, luring new businesses and baseball) and improving life for the people who already live here (Metrobus, schools and day care). One of these days, the bottom will drop out unless the city makes a master plan to balance increasing the tax base and increasing intergenerational population sustainability.
And what about the pity party? Isn't DC supposed to be oppressed under the thumb of jackasses like Ernest Istook and Orrin Hatch? Hizzoner would do well by keeping the good times on the DL until the federal budget gets signed into law. But we can't do that, because Tony is or isn't or is again or then again maybe isn't running for reëlection and incumbent executives love election-year budgets full of goodies for everyone, whether prudent or not.
So what we get is a good budget we shouldn't brag about, reflecting good times we know won't last. Better get your library time in now, folks.
Posted by rj3 at March 24, 2005 9:29 AM
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Comments
> One of these days, the bottom will drop out
> unless the city makes a master plan to balance
> increasing the tax base and increasing
> intergenerational population sustainability.
Just out of curiosity, though, how exactly is DC different from San Francisco a few decades ago? SF was transformed when affluent professionals bought into its neighborhoods, and it has been fairly resilient throughout the years, even through the dot-com bust, which dramatically impacted the yuppie landscape of the Bay Area. Property demand remains high, and the largest chunk of the city's population (25%) continues to be twenty- and thirty-somethings. Less than 17% of those have children.
SF, in other words, is a mid-sized city that went through a cycle of urban decay and rapid gentrification and has yet to experience a bottoming-out. And budget shortfalls don't count; I'm talking about a bottoming-out by DC standards, which means DC circa 1994.
Posted by: vor at March 24, 2005 3:00 PM
Well, DC is different from San Francisco in several important respects. First of all, Washington will always have a large downtown core that employs middle class, middle-aged civil servants. Whether they live in the city or move out (most already have) creates a whole cascade of consequences, from taxes to commuting patterns to neighborhood stability.
The flipside of this is that there is a lot of office space/land that will never be used by the creative classes that are so prized by cities, limiting the growth of desirable migrants. To some extent, the city will always be divided between rich/young/upwardly mobile and poor/stuck here. How we treat both groups requires trade-offs, but you can't just hope one withers away, because it won't.
Posted by: rj3 at March 25, 2005 10:43 AM